by Jonah Stein on November 19, 2009
While sitting around at Pubcon chewing the fat ( a marvelous Rib Eye) with a couple of very, very smart people who shall remain nameless, the subject of the emerging war between Apple and Google came up. Specifically, we were discussing the one box music search and the notable absense of iTunes from the choices for to buy digital content from Google’s new music player in the SERP.
After we agreed that cloud based DRM has certain advantages for users and lamented that Apple was unlikely to counter by licensing iTunes for Palm, Droid, RIM or Symbian (too bad because it would be a pretty shrewd move to counter Google and put a lot of pressure on everyone to make DRM purchases portable across platform), we got to discussing monetization of the OneBox and what a slippery slope that represesented.
Ultimately the conversation turned to MySpace and how it was trying to find its way back to its “roots” as a community for music and bands. Suddenly, it struck me that Apple needs to buy MySpace. Before you say I am crazy, hear me out:
- NewsCorp is getting hammered lately and bleeding cash, including over $1 million/month in vacant office space for MySpace alone. Selling MySpace certainly wouldn’t get anything like the $15 billion dollar valuation that was once being bandied about, but even $2.5 billion would be a nice cash infusion along with a huge profit versus the $580 million acquisition price.
- Apple has something like $35 billion in the bank and billions more coming in every quarter. There are not a lot of attractive acquisitions for Apple that really provide “synergy”, they aren’t likely to start paying a dividend and they have no reason to consider a huge stock buy back. Apple has never made major acquisition and frankly it isn’t clear what technology company they would want to buy except perhaps Garmin or some other source of turn-by-turn data to counter Google. All that cash is just balance sheet bling.
- MySpace has lost its mojo and is in desperate need of being cool, hip and relevant again. Apple would immediately polish that turd and erase the stench from the idea that Fox New and MySpace are owned by the same company, a definite issue for many hipsters and “Hollywood Elites”
- Integrating with iTunes would instantly make all that music content, fan data and miscellaneous comments relevant, compelling and even VALUABLE and possibly even generate revenue by connecting directly to iTunes titles.
- The worst kept secret in the valley is that Apple is trying to become a player in streaming media to compete with the cable companies and possibly YouTube in the battle for the living room. MySpace is well connected in Hollywood and could provide many of the same synergies for iTunes play to move from the laptop to the living room.
- Apple is known for amazing industrial design, clean, intuitive user interface and MySpace… uhm… MySpace could use some of that.
- MySpace is heavily invested in geo, so it has a nice foundation for a local play and provides some synergies for potential iPhone GPS based services that are currently powered by Google.
- Finally, MySpace is STILL a fairly major online destination. Convert iTunes visitors into web traffic and the combined entity is suddenly one of the top 5 web destinations with an enormous user base which is large enough to slug it out with the other platform players. Short of making a play for Yahoo, MySpace is the only property that could allow Apple to jump off the sidelines and compete on the social front.
If anyone at Apple is listening, now is the time to act, before MySpace either finds its way or becomes irrelevant. You may not be able to get into the Google OneBox, but if you play your cards right you could dominate the organic results for music, television and movies and bring users right to your door. And if you do decide to go for it, just send me 1% for putting the deal together.
Update: 02/15/2010
MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta was unceremoniously fired last week after MySpace fell $32 million short of quarterly targets amid rumors on tension among the 3 top executives alone with some micromanagement from above, aka John Miller, head of News Corps Digital division. Add another round of layoffs since November and MySpace is probably available for a song… or 1.55 billion songs @1.29/each in a deal which does not officially disclose the purchase price.
by Jonah Stein on November 4, 2009
Ever over-think a problem or make things too complicated? Work to hard to explain a concept and feel like you are loosing half the audience?
For the last two year I have been struggling to communicate how it is crucial that site owners do the right thing by their users, even if that means forgoing short-term profits for long-term rewards. In this crusade, I coined the term Virtual Blight and have taken every opportunity to try to get people to listen to me. I have bashed Twitter for turning a blind eye to spam, I have presented at the Web 2.0 Expo and the Web 2.0 summit and I have probably alienated more than a few colleagues along the way.
Last week, In his TechCrunch bombshell How To Spam Facebook Like A Pro: An Insider’s Confession Facebook advertising guru Dennis Yu summed up the whole issue in a 10 words: Facebook will either clean things up or become a MySpace.
So, there you have it; Virtual Blight and two years of writing and speaking summed up in a sentence.
Thanks Dennis.
by Jonah Stein on October 20, 2009
Lots of Search Engine Marketers talk about the tools they use. Tools for SEO such as keyword research, link analysis and site audits. Tools for PPC like bid management and reporting. Tools for conversion tracking, analytics, and optimization. SEM is rapidly evolving and new tools are introduced every week.. ItsTheROI uses many of those tools and we never stop looking for new ones and hearing what people have to say about what they like.
There is a whole different category to tools that we use every day that have nothing to do with Search Engines. These are online tools that make it possible for us to run a small business. Some business tools are so mundane that they are not worth a detailed discussion — No one really wants me to tell them about my DSL connection, my iPhone or what hardware is on my desk. Some are services such as hosting that go beyond the scope of this article
EchoSign: Do you hate printing agreements so you can sign them and then scan them again? Ever wonder how you are going to get those hours of your life back? Does your paper filing system lack organization? Do you ever forget to follow up on an agreement you sent out? Have you lost track of all of those NDAs? If you answered yes to any of these questions or most of them, then you will fall in love with the powerful yet simple contact management and electronic signature service offered by EchoSign.
It is really very simple.
- Upload a Word Document, PDF or just about any other text doc.
- Open the document in their preview screen and place the fields you require such as name, date, title and signature.
- Email the document to the other party. You can e-sign it first or you can wait for them to send it back with the electronic signature.
- Get a completed agreement.
- You now have a legal agreement that has a digital signature, document management with an archive, the works.
Efax: If you are like me, you haven’t owned a physical fax machine for years. None the less, business still occasionally demands that 20th century form factor. When that happens, nothing is easier than an fax to email service and Efax delivers for a price that is hard to beat… Nada. Ok, they do push some advertising my way and a bunch of emails that Gmail intercepts, but overall it is hard to beat.
Freshbooks: If you are not an accountant, accounting software tends to have a relatively steep adoption curve. Freshooks small business accounting software offers a hosted solution that is easy to use. While it is more expensive than Quickbooks or other desktop accounting solutions, Freshbooks makes it easy to setup repeat billing and sends the invoices automatically each month. That feature alone is worth the $14/month it costs.
PayCycle: Payroll is another one of those tasks that takes a lot of time and creates lots of stress. Have you filed your payroll taxes this month? Did you fill the form out correctly? How about calculating the withholding? Why doe the Franchise Tax Board keep sending me letters that could be reminders about something I have already done or a threat to sue me or possible an invitation to an all day seminar about properly completing a payroll stub? Whatever the reason, I don’t have time to do that s**t and online payroll software means I don’t have to think about it.
Special bonus feature, I have all of my contractors setup on direct deposit, so I can pay them immediately without addressing an envelop, finding a stamp or giving it another thought. Paycycle.com does for employees and contractors what online banking did for paying your bills.
InfoStreet: Organizing and managing day-to-day business activity like email, to do’s, appointments, team meetings, files, clients and so on isn’t always glamorous, but it is at the heart of business success and productivity. InfoStreet offers an hosted intranet applications for as little as $10/ month. Their integrated project management and CRM software for small business is a little more complex than Google Apps or Basecamp, but the features really shine.
by Jonah Stein on October 20, 2009
Back in February, Aaron Wall wrote about a “minor” Google algorithm change that Todd Malicoat labeled the Big Brand Bailout. After a bit of controversy, Matt Cutts issued a video response to a question and labeled the change Vince after the engineer who worked on the change.
While the above conversations were interesting and create a significant amount of chatter, none of them shed any light on what ingredient Vince added to the secret sauce that produced these limited by quite stunning changes in some very, very competitive results.
SEO Book provides the answer this week, courtesy of insight by UK SEO Guru Patrick Altoft. Aaron ads some compelling evidence to Patrick’s theory that Google has incorporated user query refinement to boost rankings for sites. This is a subtle trick to reduce the noise inherent in user behavior because unlike click tracking, query refinement requires an overt action by the user from which the search engine can infer intent. It also aims to reduce the likelihood that the user will need to refine their query, which is appears to be one definition of relevance.
It isn’t clear that this explanation provides any competitive exploits. The obvious take away is to make sure that your company is a thought leader that gets included in articles about your niche and to maximize your exposure in the consideration set at the top of the search results (Organic and Paid results above the fold). Those recommendations haven’t changed in five years.
by Jonah Stein on September 30, 2009
SEOMoz gives some terrible advice about SEO and user focused development. Rand presents some graphs about different optimization components and how their effect on ranking has evolved over time and magically draws the conclusion that SEO should focus on engines, not users because additional SEO tactics are required to rank.
I am not going to comment here on how he ranks the impact of each tactic. I disagree with some of his analysis, particularly the importance of keyword research and keyword mapping but I agree with others. The larger point here is that Rand is arguing against “focusing on users”, saying this approach is bad SEO advice because it does not include other SEO tactics.
Rand is ignoring the considerable nuance in the meaning of “designing for users”. The art and science of designing websites for users has evolved significantly in the thirteen year thanks to the contributions of Jakob Nielsen, Gord Hotchkiss and tens of thousands of designers, conversion optimizers and site owners who have observed user behavior, tested and validated different theories to enrich the body of knowledge about user interactions with the web in general and search users in particular.
The overall consensus from this research is that the tactics embraced by push oriented designers and agencies who claim to be designing for user are not effective. Flash based sites, fancy formatting and dominant images are almost as much of an obstacle for users as they are for engines. What works for users and for search engines is delivering clear information scent that matches the search intent, bulleted content and the judicious use of bold text. Scent should be presented in easy to read text with high contrast and the content should be written with the assumption that the user wants to scan the page in 3-5 seconds to make sure they are in the correct place. If the scent is not delivered in that time frame, the user will hit the back button and “bounce” from the site. Users will rarely engage with the site navigation if the landing page doesn’t match the search intent.
During the last 12 years, SEO has evolved from the process of manipulating search engines by jamming pages full of hidden keywords to a high ROI discipline with a data driven methodology rooted in query frequency that focuses on developing a site which matches the search intent of users with content that meets that intent. I call this evolved SEO Website Optimization. The effective optimizer focuses on creating pages that attracts visitors and reduces bounce rate, engages users and creating conversions.
A majority of the changes over the last five years with regards to how the engines regard on-page and on-site factors are rooted in the engines trying to emulate human users as they crawl and interpret the page.
- Content in the golden triangle is more important than content in other locations on the page. The impact of keyword stuffed H1 tags has diminished over time but designing your site to deliver good information scent in your headline is more important than ever for both SEO and for conversion.
- Engines readily admit that the location of a link on the page matters. Links in the variable content area on the page, particularly links in the golden triangle, count more than links in the boilerplate, the left/right rail or the footer. The savvy optimizer includes the most important links as citation links above the fold in the variable content area of the site, where users are likely to see them
- Toolbar data, analytics data, conversion optimizer data and other streams give the engines an incredible assortment of information about how the user interacts with a site and we are seeing this data affect rankings more and more.
While the engines are tight lipped about how they use this data, Matt Cutts revealed at SES San Jose this year that Sitelinks are driven, at least in part, by the popularity of individual pages on the site. During a site clinic review of Meijer.com he observed that their Store Locator is buried in their primary navigation (and suggested they make it more prominent) but that is was a popular page “because it appears in your sitelink”. The Meijer Store locator page is also the second listing below the sitelink despite being buried in the global navigation and completely lacking content on the page. User behavior data explains how a boilerplate ONLY page with a few graphics is the second highest ranked page on the site.
I will not take issue with Rands observation that SEO involves a lot of tactics that are specifically for the engines nor do I embrace the Google party line that says “make content for users, not for engines”. SEO is a multi-faceted discipline and I completely concur that these factors cannot be ignored. On the other hand, any SEO who does not focus on designing sites for users is doing a huge disservice to themselves and their clients.
Conversion takes place at the intersection of search intent, content and user experience. More and more, on-site SEO occurs at the same intersection.
Updated: Rand posted an update on his site as well as a comment here reflecting that he was misunderstood. He was trying to say that it is a mistake to ignore SEO for the engines and ONLY focus on users. It is impossible to argue with that. Given that, I have toned down my remarks some and I hope we can agree that user centric design is essential for SEO…it just isn’t enough.
